Category: Prayer

On this feast of the child saints of Fatima, we do well to mark the words of Pope Saint John Paul II: “…the Church wishes to put on the candelabrum these two candles which God lit to illumine humanity in its dark and anxious hours.” Claire Dwyer remembers their brief lives and eternal message of prayer and hope.

Some of the greatest saints of the Church – and through Scripture, even God Himself – have used the example of gazing into the eyes of another to try to capture the beautiful and astonishingly real experience of God’s great love in the soul: contemplative prayer. Claire Dwyer reflects.

What is our response to the Word of God? Are we attentive to it? Do we allow ourselves to be moved to praise, repentance, and gratitude? Do we put it on the proper platform in our lives, giving it a place of primacy in our prayer? Claire Dwyer reflects on today’s readings.

“The silence of prayer is a surrendering of our own words and the noise surrounding us so that something far fuller can rush in – so that we can be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:19). So that the creative, powerful and eternally self-donating Word, the one Word that matters, the eloquent Word that contains perfectly within it all our poor scattered syllables of truth, can be spoken. And in speaking, transform us within that silence to be a little bit more like Him. In speaking, reduce our interior and exterior storms to obedient breezes.”
Claire Dwyer reflects on the necessity of silence in the spiritual life.